Building your own Computer?

superscaper

Bamber19 wrote: »

Whilst everyone loves to point out that the sale of goods act protects us anyway if the company wont play ball it can be time consuming to enforce.

Exact same thing can be said of extended warranties. Last time I used an extended warranty for a pc, actually I'm still trying to get it sorted even today and the problem started eight months ago. It would have actually been less hassle, cheaper and much much faster if we'd not had the warranty and gone through the entire small claims court process. If a company is bad, it's bad and if they are stubborn about upholding your rights under the law then there's no real reason as to why they would uphold their own warranty.

wolfman

I wouldn't try to make a pc last for 3-4 years. Instead around 18months to 2 years is good, then sell bits and upgrade, or sell the whole thing and upgrade. You'll get a much better return on it, and keep with the times.

I'm lucky in that I can just sell down to my younger brother or parents, then they sell down to people at work/uncle's etc...

And I'nve never bothered with extended warranties either. I've yet to have any real problems because of that over 10 years, maybe I'm just lucky though.

For a self build I like to spend a minimum of around £450 just on the base unit.

DUKE

It's cheaper to buy one these days - husband build the one I'm on now about 10 years ago and it was the best at that time (obviously upgraded since) and it cost almost £3,0000 - bang went my honeymoon :eek:

He wanted to build another but it was just so expensive that he went to Dell.

DUKE

Sorry I've added an extra nought there :rolleyes:

Idiophreak

As other's have said...the more you want to spend, the more building your own's worth while. If I was doing a linux/free OS build, I think I could just about undercut dell on a machine, but to get official Windows, stuff like that, keeps knocking the price up.

I also agree with wolfman...the idea of making it last 3 years might not be a great one...suggests you'd buy "cutting edge" stuff - which is always overpriced (well "expensive" more strictly speaking)...You'd do much better to build a PC "a year behind the times" but upgrade it more often - this will save you money and you'll still be able to do anything you want with it (you'll just miss a couple of FPS in games, or lose a couple of points in a benchmark...and won't be able to brag about your specs online )

Building is easy...It took me a couple of days to build my last one, but that includes a lot of stuff most people don't do (making holes in /painting the case, tidying cables, modifying fans etc)...When I build "vanilla" systems for my friends it normally takes around half hour.

And like everyone else said...just get an idea what you want to buy, then compare prices from ebuyer, scan, kustompcs, aria, microdirect, overclockers etc etc etc. I ended up getting my last PC from about 7 different places - but it's a really nice feeling, having a big pile building up of all of the kit you're going to put in it.

I'd definitely recommend building your own...I don't use my PC so much these days, but I really like looking at it and *knowing* that nobody, anywhere, has the same machine. Just wish I could afford to do it more often

Millionaire

superscaper wrote: »

Exact same thing can be said of extended warranties. Last time I used an extended warranty for a pc, actually I'm still trying to get it sorted even today and the problem started eight months ago. It would have actually been less hassle, cheaper and much much faster if we'd not had the warranty and gone through the entire small claims court process. If a company is bad, it's bad and if they are stubborn about upholding your rights under the law then there's no real reason as to why they would uphold their own warranty.

You must have one c*ap extended warranty SS. Who's it with?

superscaper

Millionaire wrote: »

You must have one c*ap extended warranty SS. Who's it with?

Not mine, my pc is home built. It's my parents' Mesh pc. Three year onsite warranty, for all the good that does. My own first pc also had two year onsite warranty (Polar Computers) which was also a hassle (point blank refusal to send anyone out) and was a huge problem. So believe me, in my experience actually having to go through with a small claims case would be a walk in the park by comparison and why I personally NEVER take out any extended warranties on anything.

marleyboy

I find it cheaper to build a pc, its easy to do and can save you a fortune depending on speck, like SS I wouldnt dream of extended warranties, especially with computers, theyre just not worth it. But the advantage of building a pc aside from the cost, has to be that you can make it specific to your needs, at the same time you gain a little self "techie" experience.